


Broken Chorus

by Leopardmask



Category: Hermitcraft RPF
Genre: Angst, Does this count as a sickfic?, Ender xB, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Stomach problems, Turf War wagers, Unintended Consequences, no beta we die like someone who's tired of Endbusting, non-permanent minecraft death, season 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:47:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28430385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leopardmask/pseuds/Leopardmask
Summary: Everyone in the Turf War was making plans. What was the harm in another little wager?
Comments: 12
Kudos: 76





	Broken Chorus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [calcium_rods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/calcium_rods/gifts).



Cub somewhat regretfully started pulling chorus fruit out of a chest. He had been so confident in that bet... Oh well. It'd be a bit jarring at first, and the "fruit" didn't really taste all that good, but it was only for a couple weeks - he'd get used to it.

In fact, he was getting hungry now, so as soon as he had put away his usual food, Cub ate one of the chorus fruits he had grabbed. It was actually the stalk of the chorus plant, not a true fruit, and it tasted remarkably like alien celery. When he swallowed the last bite, his stomach wrenched uncomfortably as it, followed by the rest of him, was yanked to a new location.

Oh yeah. He'd forgotten it felt like  _ that. _

This might be a longer two weeks than he'd anticipated.

\-----

After only a day, Cub realized another problem: chorus fruit wasn’t very filling. It seemed like he was constantly having to stop what he was doing to eat a piece and be dragged around by the random teleportation. The metallic, faintly bitter taste certainly didn’t make him want to eat any more.

After two days, his stomach started to clench in anticipation whenever he brought another fruit to his mouth. It was still manageable, just a brief moment of hesitation each time, but it could only get worse.

After four days, he stopped going into the Nether. His stomach was starting to complain about the abuse and the weak diet; he didn’t need the additional swirling nausea of those portals. Besides, traveling through the Overworld sky with a breeze in his face felt nice.

Five days into the challenge, Cub found himself avoiding water. He was sure he must be dehydrated, dealing with the fibrous plants and working in the hot desert, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch even the decorative channels running through his base. Even the mildest seawater almost stung his skin.

Six days in, it occurred to Cub that he might be a little feverish. His hands were too shaky to play or test his own games, his breathing suffered a bit, and he was always cold, even just outside his pyramid. His gut churned all the time, even when he hadn’t eaten a chorus fruit in hours. Most foods seemed okay in large quantities - many hermits basically lived off of golden carrots - so it came as a surprise that chorus fruit might be an exception. Ironically, Cub thought, xB - the person he had made this bet with in the first place - was probably the only hermit here who  _ could _ live on chorus fruit with little issue, thanks to a little incident a few months ago in the End.

After a week of the chorus-only diet, Cub was considering asking xB if he would agree to calling off the dare. They had of course known this would be at least a little unpleasant, otherwise it wouldn’t be an interesting wager, but neither had realized it would affect someone this badly. But on the other hand, Cub was competitive and stubborn, and didn’t want to chicken out on the deal  _ he _ had made. So he went about his business, rubbing his stomach with his free hand and trying not to think about the fact that it was only half over.

\-----

Cub’s stomach growled. For a brief moment, hunger had overcome his nausea. He did need to eat, as much as he now detested what he was eating. He put one arm around himself in anticipation, and brought a chorus fruit to his mouth.

One bite made him double over, clutching his stomach with both hands as it twisted and tore him away from the work he had been trying so hard to concentrate on. Black spots filled his vision. He felt himself hit a cool stone surface, but never saw where he had landed before he passed out.

\-----

Cub awoke with his arms still wrapped around himself and with no sense of how much time had passed. It was chilly, but strangely, Cub felt a little less cold than before. He opened his eyes a crack and saw dark sky. It had been morning, last he knew. Had he been unconscious all day? He was a sitting duck, out under the open sky at night, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Respawn might even make him feel better... although, come to think of it, he was feeling okay, by comparison. Not that that was saying much. The cold, still air worked to bring the fever he had been ignoring down somewhat, and its sharp thinness alleviated his stomach ache ever so slightly.

There were barely any animal sounds around him - just a few familiarly alien burbles and clicks. Cub frowned, opened his eyes further, and chanced a look around.

He was in the End. The Outer End, by the looks of things.

His heart started racing, and his nausea returned full force. Cub groaned and curled up until the feeling subsided again.

How had a chorus fruit brought him all the way out here? There was some interesting science there, he was sure, but right now his focus was on getting home without eating any more.

After a few minutes, Cub felt well enough to sit up. He pulled out an ender chest, set it down on the tiny round island, and started packing as much stuff as he could into it. He knew of one way home that would be faster than anything else. Inventory empty, he stood up and swayed backward. He toppled, more than jumped, off the edge of the little island into the void below.

Respawn pulled him back to the world of the living... on a tiny, circular island, with his ender chest next to him. And still nursing a slight fever and stomach pain.  _ What...? _

Finally, he opened his communicator. Stuck in the End, no food except the horrible stuff that had gotten him here, barely enough strength to stand, much less fly or bridge - Cub needed help.

**cubfan135 fell out of the world**

<Grian> it happens   
<Tango> Uh-oh! You good?

<cubfan135> no

<Tango> :(

<cubfan135> I’m stuck in the End

<cubfan135> don’t ask me how, respawn got wacked

<cubfan135> I may need an actual rescue

<xBCrafted> send coords, I’ll help you out

<Xisuma> When you get back, I’ll see what I can do about the respawn issue

<Xisuma> Certainly an odd one

Cub sent his coordinates to the chat, then flopped onto his back, staring quite literally into space, then closing his eyes. He wasn’t sure if xB was the best person or the worst to come find him out here. It would give him an excuse to call off the rest of the wager - if xB didn’t make him agree to stop as soon as he found out. Persisting past even three days had been so  _ stupid- _

Footsteps prompted Cub to open his eyes, but it was only an enderman. Which Cub was now looking directly at.

The enderman screeched. Cub scrambled back up against his ender chest, closing his eyes again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Cub stammered, knowing it was a pointless thing to say. The enderman was going to kill him, catch him in a death loop-

He heard a  _ vwoop _ and more footsteps. But these were soft sneakers, not the hard claw-feet of an enderman. Someone stepped in front of Cub. “No no no stop! Stop, please! You don’t need to hurt him!”

Cub dared to look. A nervous xB was standing between him and the enderman, staring defiantly at the enderman. The enderman paused, sizing them up, then made an almost huffy sound and teleported away.

xB turned and held out his hand to Cub, pulling him to his feet. Cub leaned heavily on xB’s shoulder, suddenly dizzy. “Thanks, man,” Cub mumbled.

xB stumbled slightly under the unexpected weight, but steadied him. “Dude,” he said, surprisingly quickly guessing the reason Cub was unwell. “You could have said something. It was supposed to be a silly challenge, not torture.”

“Wanted to...” Cub started. “I wanted...” He trailed off, realizing how idiotically stubborn he sounded. “...Never mind.”

xB frowned. “Hang on. Look at me for a sec?”

Cub raised his head toward xB. xB winced. “Uhhhh. Yeah. Okay. So... your eyes are not supposed to shine like mine do. Even a little bit. You  _ really _ OD’d on chorus fruit, didn’t you? Is that how you ended up in the End?”

Cub paused, unsure, then nodded.

xB hoisted Cub more securely. “Alright. We gotta get you to X, okay?”

xB focused on a point on the nearest large landmass, and with a  _ vwoop, _ they were there. Cub immediately groaned and staggered away from him, one arm wrapped around himself. Cub leaned against a chorus plant as if he was about to throw up. xB walked over and gently rubbed his back.

“No teleports,” Cub finally murmured. “Sorry. I... I just can’t handle them right now. Too much like the chorus fruit.”

“Oh gosh, I should be the sorry one,” xB exclaimed. “That didn’t even occur to me. You must be, like... conditioned to feel bad every time you teleport now. Are you okay to just walk?”

"Yeah, just gimme a minute."

While Cub recovered, xB stepped away to confer with the nearest enderman. Cub couldn't hear what they were saying, but xB returned looking confident. "So I just got directions to the nearest End city. It's not too far, and that enderman I was talking to will go on ahead and let them know we're coming. It said something about 'securing the way', too, and I don't know if that means just the city or if they'll help us get there? But if you're ready, we can head that way."

\-----

With xB offering his shoulder for support, the two slowly made their way to the End city. Shulkers peered suspiciously at them, but xB talked soothingly at the shulkers, as if they were nervous dogs, and they reluctantly closed their shells again. xB sat Cub against an inside wall at ground level while he figured out what to do next.

First step: decide what he needed. He had already decided that they would stay here until Cub was comfortable using the gateways. The End was a sparse place, and even in a city like this one there wasn’t much in terms of supplies a human could use: just the occasional item that a shulker had happened to pick up from previous unlucky travelers. xB had some normal food, but more would be handy, and maybe some farming supplies if they had to stay for a while; extra water...

Cub shivered. xB added “campfire and blankets” to his mental list.

Next step: contact Xisuma. Their admin would have to come to them. xB also sent him the supply list.

Cub blearily watched xB and a couple of endermen bustle around the structure. Eventually, xB sat down across the small room from him and struck up a conversation with an enderman. If Cub listened closely, he was pretty sure he could understand the tone of the enderman, if not the words.

“Do you guys know anything about this?” xB inquired. The enderman gave a few sentences in reply, ending with a question of its own.

“Well, he’s only eaten chorus fruit for the past week, and I guess it’s not very good for humans to do that. We didn’t realize how bad until today.”

Surprise and confusion from the enderman.

xB frowned. “You only feed that part of the plant to shulkers? Huh. We mostly use it as kind of a joke, because we get randomly teleported whenever we eat it. So he and I, we made a bet, and the loser had to eat chorus fruit as their only food for a while...”

An apologetic noise.

“Yeah,” xB sighed, “we’re probably the first humans to even come to y’all with this problem. Makes sense that it hasn’t exactly been tested.”

Another question.

“I mean, we’re going back to the Overworld eventually,” xB explained. “But I don’t know how long we’ll have to stay until then. After all that chorus fruit,  _ any _ teleporting Cub does makes him sick, so I can’t take him through a gateway or the fountain until he’s recovered a bit. There’ll be another person showing up soon to help, by the way.”

Different question.

“Ummm. I don’t really know what you mean. We can tell y’all what’s happened from this, as much as we can, but I don’t know about  _ doing _ things to him.”

Acknowledgement.

At that moment, Xisuma arrived, startling everyone in the room with an admin teleport - silent except for a slight rush of displaced air. xB stood to greet him and introduce him to the endermen. Xisuma gave the one in the room a respectful bow.

“Hey X,” Cub managed.

Xisuma knelt next to him. Data started to scroll across the inside of Xisuma’s visor as he chatted. “Hi, Cub. How on earth did you manage this one?”

Cub answered with a brief chuckle. “You know me. Can’t let a challenge go. This one got the better of me, I guess.”

Xisuma smiled. “Hey, you’re laughing! You must be feeling better. xB told me you were in a pretty bad way when he found you.”

“I am, yeah,” Cub confirmed. “Still don’t think I want to take any chances with more teleports any time soon. But something about being out here is helping, I think.”

“Maybe it’s the fact that you’re actually resting for once?” xB joked, making Cub laugh again, then wince at the motion of his stomach.

The scan Xisuma was running finished. “Oh, that’s... interesting.”

“Well, don’t leave us hanging,” xB prompted.

“Chorus fruit is... more alien to human systems than we thought,” Xisuma explained. “There’s parts of it that humans just can’t process properly, including the teleport-y bit. Normally your body would take care of it pretty quick anyway, but since you’ve eaten so much, it’s been building up in your system. You’ve been practically poisoning yourself, Cub! The stuff must have finally hit some sort of threshold, so the next teleport threw you all the way to the End. Somehow.”

“Is... is there a solution? A cure?” xB asked tentatively.

“Yeah,” Xisuma confirmed, “time. It’ll take a few days at least, but these compounds will break down sooner or later. Once the level in his body is a bit lower, I’ll be able to reset his respawn, and by then he should be fine to use some form of teleport or another to get home. Meantime, just the standard rest, real food, and water.”

Xisuma pulled a bed out of his inventory, then made a realization. “xB, do you have some softer blocks than this purpur to place down?”

“I’ve got some grass,” Cub offered. He handed it over to xB, who spread it out near the middle of the room, while Xisuma went outside. Xisuma placed the bed some distance away from the End city, carefully pulled the blankets and pillow off, and came back in. “Here you are. Good thing I remembered beds are a bit volatile out here, eh?”

Cub wrapped himself gratefully in the blanket. Xisuma laid out a campfire and cut a hole in the ceiling for the smoke. “I’ll replace that later,” he reassured the watching enderman.

Finally, he handed Cub a piece of bread. “Boring, I know,” Xisuma said apologetically, “but best to start with something easy, yeah?”

Cub nibbled on the bread. xB grinned. “When you’re ready for it, you deserve a feast of any kind of food you want.”

“That sounds nice,” Cub said around his mouthful. “You know what, though?”

“What?”

"I could really go for some cake.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to calc for throwing this idea at the wall that is Discord to see if it would stick <3
> 
> Hey, look, I finally got to show off more ender xB! If you're newer here, xB's little "incident in the End" happened in [my very first fic,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24315304) and I've been trying to find more places to have him show up in that enderic capacity ever since.


End file.
